Moving From Christianity 101 to Christianity 102

I cannot remember a time when I did not know Jesus. I loved going to church with my father and grandmother and singing all the hymns.

At the age of thirty I settled down, got married, began a family and started attending a wonderful neighborhood church. It was the 70’s, the time of the Charismatic Renewal. Our pastor, his wife and the older ladies in the church just kept feeding and feeding us. We were like baby chicks that could not get enough.

In my mid fifties I began to say to God, “there has to be more to life than this,” and I said it many times to him. I also, very seriously, told him that up until now I had mostly learned my Christianity from what others had taught me, learned from my bible and from reading good books and fellowshipping with great people. I had learned well, however, now I wanted to know Him face to face and I emphasized “face to face”.

About 4 or 5 years later I began to say “there must be a place for the expression of the creativity you have given me here on earth”. I had begun to realize that I had God stuff inside me the likes of which I had no grid for and no-one else I knew had either. (This was at least 10 years before I knew Paul Cox). I could not accept that God was going to wait until I died before letting me give birth to it. There had to be an expression for all this God stuff in me otherwise it made no sense.

Well, time passed and I can’t remember that any bells rang or whistles blew. I kept going on and growing, but not being satisfied about my walk with the Lord. It was not fulfilling even though I loved the Lord and was always looking for him.

About 10 -13 years passed. It was about time to celebrate our wedding anniversary and I was thinking about what my husband and I might do. Into my thinking I heard the Lord say to me very loud and distinctly “this is his last anniversary, why don’t you have a dinner party?” Now this statement by the Lord did not cause me to be anxious but I heard it and stored it in my mind knowing that it would either come to pass or not. I did not worry about it.

We did have a wonderful dinner party with friends we went to high school with and some of these had been friends of my husband’s since kindergarten.

About 10 days after the party my husband crashed his plane and life changed again in a big way. When I received this news my first thought was, “I cannot live through this” and then I immediately remembered that for years I had prayed that I would be equipped for whatever knocked on my door on any given day. So that allowed me to catch my breath. The death of someone you have known forever is a very traumatic event for a family besides all of the physical things that need to be done your; emotions and thoughts run amuck. I also soon came to realize that I no longer could relate to my Lord the way I had for the last 35 yrs.

The Word was meaningless, my ritual devotions were meaningless, my worship went no where and church had lost its meaning. As I entered into the full realization of this I did not know which was worse, my husband’s sudden death or my inability to relate to my Lord who meant everything to me. I cried many buckets of tears for months. It was very difficult and only now, as I look retrospectively back, can I describe it. This is what it was like. I was naked, stripped bare and someone was scrubbing me all over with a bristly scrub brush and IT HURT!

After about 5 months of this I happened upon the Psalms in the Living Translation and it was as though I had found gold. I gobbled the Psalms for a year. It was that long before I could read anything else that meant anything to me. During this time I was becoming acquainted with Paul Cox and learning about discernment.

At 1 year and 7 days after my husband’s death I was in Ireland where God chose to bring forth what Paul called “an apostolic anointing.” As I look back, this was my Lord allowing me to enter into Christianity 102. This wonderful discerning servant of our Lord had validated me here on earth and given a name to what I was about.

One of the lessons from all of this is that God is faithful to perform His good will in us. He may have taken very long to get me where I am today from my first prayer in my fifties, but He did it. He took me out of my old ways of thinking and relating and He has made all things new once again for me. Lord, I am eternally grateful, amazed and thankful.